Yesterday was the first day of school for the boys. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a month. I was very much ready to have the house and my computer to myself. I was craving a few hours of completely solitary time to write without interruptions for lunch or for assistance in finding a clean pair of socks. I did get a couple of hours of quiet time in the morning, but it was only a half day of school. After noon, I was back to being a full service concierge for the boys.
Last night, Jonah and I worked on a system for organizing his notebooks. Steve did the back-to-school shopping with the boys and let Jonah loose in Staples without any guidance. Jonah purchased large (and expensive) binders for each of his eight classes. His system, or lack thereof, would not fit in his backpack, and he ended up carting around the extra binders in a plastic shopping bag. He had no place for pencils and planned on putting a couple of two-inch pencils in the front pocket of his jeans.
While he was in school, I went back to Staples and found a pencil case with three rings for the binders. I consolidated his system down to two binders – one for the morning classes and one for the afternoon classes. I bought three-ring folders to hold important papers from his teachers. Then I walked him through the system, and together, we made labels for the folders and the dividers.
There’s something about parenting that forces you to do a compare and contrast with your own youth. When I was fourteen, my parents were certainly not helping me organize my binders. Sure, high school was a lot easier back then. A trapper folder did the trick. The high school course catalog didn’t have the options of a small liberal arts college. But, still, I was a lot more independent than Jonah is at fourteen.
I suppose I was a lot more independent than other kids my age, because my parents were figuring out middle class parenting from scratch. Both had come from highly dysfunctional, working-class families, and they had no traditions to fall back upon. They were fabulous parents. I always had clean clothes and a proper meal at dinner time. My dad stayed up all night helping me type up my English essays. But they gave me a lot of freedom that would be totally weird today and was probably a little bit odd even back then.
I dealt with the college application process entirely on my own. There were no tours of college campuses. I took out a book from the library with the rankings of the colleges. I figured out which group of colleges that I could get into based on my grades and SAT scores. I narrowed down the list to about ten. I filled out the forms by myself. I wrote the essay without them even glancing over the paper to look for typos or grammatical errors. Their only involvement in my college plans came when they told me that they could only afford the one public college on my acceptance list.
When I was nineteen, I sat around my childhood bedroom during a summer break with two high school buddies. We hatched a plan of backpacking through Europe the following summer. We, well mostly me, spent the year researching this plan. I figured out how much money that I would need. Using my own money saved up from summer jobs and a job in the dishroom at college, I put aside $2,000 for the entire trip. I went to a travel agent and booked a plane ticket. I bought a Eurorail pass. I sent away for American Hostels membership and book. (All this was prior to the Internet, so everything was snail mail and books at the library.) I bought a backpack. Nobody in my family had been to Europe before, so I relied on books for assistance about the best sights to check out.
Then the following summer, I went to Europe with my two high school friends for six weeks. My parents had no idea where we were for six weeks. No cell phones or e-mail check-ins. No AFS or study abroad bureaucracy to supervise the trip. We had put together a tentative schedule, but we switched things up after one week, when we had a particularly good time in Ireland and wanted to spend more time there. If something terrible had happened, my parents wouldn’t even have known what country we were in.
I turned 20 in Venice. It was a fabulous trip. It was a life-changing trip. Not just because of the Uffizi, the Louvre, the pub in Dublin, and the new friend in Bologna. But because I organized and executed a six-week trip entirely on my own at age 19.
Apt. 11d 
You have a half day to start the school year–ai yai yai.
“When I was fourteen, my parents were certainly not helping me organize my binders.”
I somehow stumbled onto a clipboard organizing system when I started high school that worked really well, but it sounds like Jonah has way more going on than I did at that age. Of course, two years later, I was starting college in a strange city on a college campus I had never been to before.
“There were no tours of college campuses.”
I think that the college tours (unless it’s a close tie between two schools) is an awful waste of money, given the internet. What are you judging, if not the shininess of the gym, residence halls, dining halls and/or the stateliness of the campus architecture?
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My parents were both more involved and less involved. They would have never said anything about my folders or organization for class, but they were very involved in the college selection process (e.g. before I started applying they told me what funds were available and made sure I applied to a fairly wide variety of schools).
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“e.g. before I started applying they told me what funds were available and made sure I applied to a fairly wide variety of schools”
I’ve been trying to make sure that the line “at most four years of college funding” gets drummed into my kids’ heads.
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Anyway, from about 13 to 17, I was in a constant, but mostly polite, struggle with my mom for more space. She was of the Italian-close-knit family type and I took after my father’s side.
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Yes, I had to fight with my mom for more space at times, too. But she wasn’t consistent. She wasn’t involved in the college process at all. She did care if I went to church on Sunday and had salad at dinner time. She gave me a hard time when it was time to move out after college, because she thought that paying for rent was a waste of money when I could live for free at home.
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I think that part of the change in middle class parenting (or whatever it is we are — not precisely middle class) is that we are terrified of the consequences of failure. I did my college applications on my own, too. My parents had facilitated my participation in some of the invitations I got to visit colleges (say, the program to attract girls to engineering programs at Johns Hopkins), but they didn’t supervise my college applications (and, neither, rather surprisingly, did my counselor at an elite girls school, which I am sure is much more hands on now). I managed to only fill out some of the essay questions for one of the schools I applied to — they contacted me a few weeks after to submit the essays (I wrote them that night, on a typewriter, as a first draft, with, I’m sure, typos, foolish ones, of the type that people laugh at now, I was accepted at that school which currently has a 9% acceptance rate). Allowing me to flail (and I was not nearly as organized as my own daughter) was possible because the consequences of failure didn’t seem as pronounced.
Now part of that is a state of mind — going to the local public U was a perfectly acceptable option, and not one that was going to go away without major catastrophe (say, a felony conviction, which was not in the cards). But part of the difference compared to now is a real change in the degree of competitiveness. In the 80’s, I was probably a “recruited” student, but I had nothing of the track record that recruited students have these days. When I said that to another mom, she said, well, you’d have done things differently if the competition was what it was now. That’s probably true, but it increases the pressure for a student like that to make sure they’ve explored all the options.
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“He had no place for pencils and planned on putting a couple of two-inch pencils in the front pocket of his jeans.”
So funny. My kiddo, yes, the girl, made us go back to the store so that she could make sure that her subject binder, notebook, and pencil case were color coordinated (a small tragedy when we couldn’t find any blue notebooks to match the blue binder, and so had to switch the whole system to yellow, but, oh no, there were no yellow pencil cases). I argued that the blue pencil case actually looked pretty sharp with the yellow notebook. We also made (and, yes, I was complicit in this, my daughter asked me carefully to make sure that I wanted to do it) custom binder covers for each subject.
Most of the description above is style, but she’s also very well organized. She also supervised the organization of the 4th grader, who is encountering a binder for the first time, advising him on the merits of binders and helping him organize his pencils and supplies and his subject folders. She has plans to help him stay on top of the organization and learn to do it himself, too.
I had to cut her off of the school supply organizing on the grounds that it was an inefficient use of her time — kind of like cutting a kid off from video games (and for much the same reason).
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“(and, yes, I was complicit in this, my daughter asked me carefully to make sure that I wanted to do it)”
Your daughter is great.
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Today’s ubiquitous communication sure makes our contact-free days of old seem unbelievable. We can Skype with Eldest at university and there are usually several text conversations each day, just checking in or sharing observations on what celebrities are in town for [insert name of interesting event here].
She’s not quite as independent as I was at the same stage but I think that all of this communication and information makes it harder to strike out on your own. On the other hand, I did my undergrad in my hometown whereas Eldest has moved hundreds of kilometres away.
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At 16, I was living 4 hours away in an apartment with no phone. I called home once a week, collect, from a pay phone.
I had a run-in a few years ago with the junior high teachers. They were insisting that we buy exactly what was on the school supply list, right down to brand name – no off brand crayons, it could make a kid feel bad to have something different. That is the rationale I was given. The list called for 6 binders 1 1/2 inch. So, 1 inch binders were available for 99 cents each, while the 1 1/2 inch binders were 3.95 each. Money was tight back then & I needed 12 binders. We bought the 1 inch binders and the school sent home nasty notes and actually docked points from the kids. I told the kids that this was an excellent lesson in small minded idiocy and petty tyranny.
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“it could make a kid feel bad to have something different”
Holy hell. Yet nasty notes sent home and docking points from kids are ok? Kudos for you for finding the lesson from that experience.
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Oh, and they didn’t fill those binders – they would have been fine with 3 1 inch binders each.
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I hate it when schools do that — if they want everyone to have the same thing, they should ask for the money and buy it. I guess it’s a remnant of old styles of funding and maybe the prep school list (like in Harry Potter). But, they got to choose their wands.
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Mr. Geeky and I were talking about this independence issue in regards to our son, now at college. Throughout high school, we were perplexed by how much we had to prod him to do things that we just did on our own: homework, college applications, finding a job. We’re still prodding him a bit, but now that he’s away from us–and broke–he seems to be figuring things out. Like his parents, he’s kind of an idea guy. He doesn’t like to get bogged down in the details of what notebook to put his ideas in. College allows that kind of freedom. And he’s figuring out what details are important, like needing spending money to visit friends or go to the movie. Luckily at his public university, he’s surrounded by other broke students. Microwave popcorn and “Up” in the lounge!
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